Supportive mom

I guess I must have been in seventh grade when the Shōgun miniseries was on t.v. It was a big deal in our house and because there was one t.v. that was what was on that week.

I ended up thinking it was pretty cool, so I wanted to read the book.

I went to a school with grades 7-12 in rural Pennsylvania at the time, so that's probably why the school library had Clavell's novel in it. I saw it on the shelves, grabbed it, and tried to check it out.

The librarian laughed at me: "We have teachers who take three months to read this. You'd take all year." She took it off the counter and stuck it on the cart for reshelving. I heard her making fun of me with one of her aides.

So I went home and mentioned it to mom. That made her pretty angry. She found a used copy at a garage sale and gave it to me.

The other thing about that I remember is that she realized a few days into my reading that I appeared to be reading it really fast, and she decided I was probably trying to prove something, so she told me I had nothing to prove, then made a practice of asking me questions about the book as I progressed to make sure I was taking the time to read it closely. 

It did take me a lot less than three months to read it. 

I'm re-reading it now because the new series has reminded me of it, and it's interesting how much of the novel has stuck with me from that one reading over 40 years ago. 

It's a pretty classic "giant '70s middlebrow literature" thing, but possibly as formative as Dune was, which I read around the same time. Not because the text had literal life lessons or anything, but more because it encouraged me to think about the interiority and sometimes hard to understand motivations of others.